Windows passes Unix in server sales

Long the server operating system of choice for corporations and universities, Unix has seen its lead in the server OS market slip in recent years. Both Windows and Linux have been eating away at Unix market share for a few years, and the growing popularity of those two operating systems has taken its toll on Unix sales. As of the end of 2005, Unix is no longer the #1 server OS in terms of sales, according to market research firm IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

For the year 2005, Windows accounted for US$17.7 billion of worldwide server revenues, while Unix came in second place at US$17.5 billion. Linux came in third place with US$5.7 billion, but showed the strongest year-over-year growth with a 20.8 percent increase in revenues compared with 2004. Windows also grew, but at a slower pace, with 4.7 percent revenue growth year-over-year. The US$17.5 billion in revenues for Unix represented a 5.9 percent drop from 2004 figures.

Why is Unix getting hammered? There are a number of reasons. First would be the increasing maturity of both Windows and Linux. Unix has been around for around four decades by now, whereas Windows and Linux are comparative newcomers to the server world. However, the collaborative strength of the open source community and the financial might of Microsoft have been sufficient to spur development of their respective OSes by leaps and bounds.

In addition, there have been some notable changes in hardware. For much of recent history, "big iron" Unix servers running on SPARCs, POWER, and even Itanium chips have been the platform of choice for large corporations. Although IBM and Sun have continued to work on and improve their CPU lines, the x86 architecture has seen remarkable growth, especially with the arrival of comparatively low-cost options like the 64-bit Opteron CPU from AMD. IDC points out that unit shipments of x86 servers grew by 13.7 percent and almost 80 percent of those were 64-bit CPUs.

More interesting, perhaps, is the growth of blades. Attractive because of their form factor, ability to run several of them off of a single power supply, and the ability to hot swap them in and out of clusters, blades saw a 49.3 percent increase in units shipped in 2005 vs. 2004. IDC expects blades to continue growing in popularity in the years ahead.

Is Unix in danger of going the way of the dinosaur? Not anytime soon. Linux and Windows will continue to grow in popularity at the expense of Unix, but companies are increasingly willing to run mixed environments. In addition, many IT decision-makers believe that certain server OSes are better at specific tasks, meaning Unix has a long life ahead of it in the server rooms around the world.